Current Stats for “Pay What You Want”

Lots of people have been interested in the results of the “Pay What You Want” sale I’m having on my older rigging dvds, so I thought I’d go ahead and post some of the results!

The news has been all over this idea lately.. especially with folks like Louis CK being so incredibly successful with this model. It’s a great idea.. content creators taking control over their own distribution. I feel it benefits the two most important folks in any transaction.. the customer and the creator.

So I thought I would do this experiment.. what if I offered these valuable dvds that I created over 10 years ago at whatever price people thought they should pay. What would the animation and rigging community do? What do they think they are worth? Would they be interested?

Turns out.. yeah, people are! :)

As part of this experiment, I’m going to publish some of the results of this sale… I find them interesting. I hope you will, too!

One of the first things I did was try and decide what my “suggested” price would be. I really wanted customers to be able choose to pay whatever they wanted, but I thought it would be good to provide a “start” price.

I chose $4.99. I wanted to pick a price that I felt would show that the information is valuable, but wouldn’t be too high to cause people to think “mmm.. nahhh.. too expensive”.

Customers could still choose to pay more or less than that, but I felt it would be a good start. In fact, just over half the customers have paid what I suggested. 24% have paid more than I suggested, and 23% have paid less. It’s a pretty healthy split!

So far, the average that has been paid is $6.48, with the minimum $1 and the maximum $40.

I always love seeing where people live, so this was interesting.. People from 20 different countries have purchased the dvds, with most living in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands. Canada, Germany, and Australia followed up, with an additional 16% of the folks coming from such places as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Colombia and New Zealand.

It’s also interesting to see the average paid by folks in those countries..

So as you can see.. while the United States definitely had the most people purchasing the DVDs.. folks in Australia and Germany were more generous with their purchases. Woot!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this brief glimpse into how the sale has been going so far! I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next!

This is a nice report of very encouraging data on an effective use of PWYW.

For those with serious interest in PWYW, I suggest thinking about a radically more advanced approach, expecially suited to aggregators or sellers with a repeat relationship business.

PWYW pricing can be far more effective and sustainable when enhanced by ongoing feedback and dialog in an ongoing business relationship. The new FairPay revenue strategy (Fair Pay What You Want) applies feedback and dialog to incentivize buyers to price fairly, and to limit future offers to those who do not pay fairly.

FairPay combines
-the user freedom of pay-what-you-want pricing, with
-feedback, accountability, and seller control of future offers
to make it fair to both buyers and sellers in a continuing relationship.

FairPay works through a very simple balancing dynamic:
1. Selectively offer to let the buyer set any price the buyer considers fair – after the sale (Fair Pay What You Want, post-sale).
2. Track that price and determine whether the seller agrees that is fair, and use that information to let the seller decide whether to make further offers of that kind to that buyer in the future.

This gives buyers a strong incentive to price fairly (based on actual known value) – and enables sellers to limit their future exposure to those who do not. (Setting PWYW prices after sale is an important improvement in itself, since it removes the need to discount for possible buyer remorse, and thus gets buyers to price with full knowledge of the value received.)

I am the Purchasing Agent for Full Sail University and several instructors have requested the purchase of your product. Can we set up an account to order with Purchase orders and be invoiced for payment? If so, where would we send the check?

I need to get your Company set up in our system for purchase orders and payment. Please give me a call at 407-679-0100 x8639 or respond to cbruton@fullsail.com.